2014 British Grand Prix

The red flag on the first lap allowed all the drivers to change their tyres immediately. Most of them chose to, but none of those who did remained completed the race without a further pit stop.

One of the drivers who made the most effective use of this opportunity was Daniel Ricciardo, who switched from medium to hard compounds tyres. He then put medium tyres back on as early as lap 15, and continued to the end of the race on the same set of tyres.

He fended off an attack from Jenson Button in the closing stages with what was technically a one-stop strategy as he only pitted once during the race.

“The one stop wasn’t planned,” he said. “We pitted quite early on the [hard] because we were quite slow and it wasn’t working, so we came in for the [medium] and, at one point, my engineer pretty much said ‘alright four laps to go on this tyre then let’s box’.”

“I said ‘the pace seems OK, the tyres aren’t getting any worse and let’s try and stay out or at least think about keeping me out there’ and he said ‘OK we’ll look at our options’.

“Then, a few laps later he said ‘do you think you can go to the end, there’s 15 or 20 laps to go?’, and I said ‘at the moment I think we can give it a crack’. And so, yeah, we did and it paid off.”

But team mate Sebastian Vettel made his first true pit stop even earlier which left him unable to do the same – something his race engineer acknowledged after the race.

“We decided to pit relatively early to try and get the undercut on the McLaren cars ahead,” explained Christian Horner. “Whilst that was successful with both the cars, unfortunately it put us out of the range of a one-stop with Sebastian.”

Fernando Alonso did the reverse – having started on the hard tyres he used two sets of mediums to get to the end of the race. The single lap he did on hards at the start was sufficient to meet the requirement under the rules for everyone to use both types of tyre.

British Grand Prix tyre strategies

The tyre strategies for each driver:

Stint 1

Stint 2

Stint 3

Stint 4

Lewis Hamilton

Medium (24)

Hard (17)

Hard (11)

Valtteri Bottas

Medium (1)

Medium (30)

Hard (21)

Daniel Ricciardo

Medium (1)

Hard (14)

Medium (37)

Jenson Button

Medium (28)

Hard (24)

Sebastian Vettel

Medium (1)

Hard (9)

Medium (23)

Medium (19)

Fernando Alonso

Hard (1)

Medium (24)

Medium (27)

Kevin Magnussen

Medium (27)

Hard (25)

Nico Hulkenberg

Medium (29)

Hard (23)

Daniil Kvyat

Medium (14)

Medium (21)

Hard (17)

Jean-Eric Vergne

Medium (1)

Hard (26)

Medium (24)

Sergio Perez

Medium (1)

Hard (25)

Medium (25)

Romain Grosjean

Medium (1)

Hard (29)

Medium (21)

Adrian Sutil

Medium (1)

Medium (22)

Hard (28)

Jules Bianchi

Medium (1)

Medium (28)

Hard (22)

Kamui Kobayashi

Medium (1)

Medium (17)

Hard (11)

Medium (21)

Max Chilton

Medium (1)

Medium (0)

Medium (28)

Hard (21)

Pastor Maldonado

Medium (1)

Medium (25)

Hard (23)

Nico Rosberg

Medium (18)

Medium (10)

Marcus Ericsson

Medium (1)

Medium (10)

Esteban Gutierrez

Medium (9)

Kimi Raikkonen

Hard

Felipe Massa

Medium

British Grand Prix pit stop times

How long each driver’s pit stops took, Max Chilton’s very long pit stop was due to the fact he came into the pits when the race was red-flagged and stayed their until it resumed over an hour later.

4 comments on 2014 British Grand Prix tyre strategies and pit stops

Whatever the strategy, we owe a great race to the choice of Hard or Medium tyres, that fabulous scrap between Seb and Nando would not have been possible if the tyres had been the softer, more degradable choices. Pirelli should stick to the Hard/Medium tyres for the rest of the season, the racing will always be better when the drivers can dogfight with each other without the tyres overheating and self destructing.

the problem with that is just that it doesnt work for some of the teams like lotus and force india who are lighter on their tyres the racing is much closer with slightly softer tyres but i wouldnt want them too soft (like 2013) maybe a little bit softer for next year

Many teams and drivers have complained about the conservative, or ‘too hard’ tyres this year. You can’t just select the hardest tyres for every grand prix because some tracks will not work the tyres hard enough to keep them at temperature, or only the teams with the highest downforce would be able to which would exaggerate the performance gap between teams.

But yes the harder tyres this race allowed the 2 stoppers to race pretty much flat out while the one stoppers could go to the end comfortably without tip-toeing round for 52 laps.